The hardest part of creating an opera is working out what sound world it lives in. i try to terrify myself! jake heggie

Joyce DiDonato (mezzo), Time for Three Platoon PLAT29101 65:05 mins Is it a song cycle? An opera? Musical theatre? Kevin Puts’s new work Emily – No Prisoner Be, based on texts by Emily Dickinson, is a

‘They shut me up in Prose – As when a little Girl They put me in the Closet – Because they liked me “still”.’ The words (and eccentric capitalisation) are Emily Dickinson’s, the opening salvo in a bol

Music is a serious business. Whether it’s love, death, heartbreak, loneliness, power, conflict, destruction, sin, faith, hope, despair… you name it, every weighty subject and state of mind has been ta

Yunchan Lim (piano) Decca 4871517 77 mins That Yunchan Lim is a remarkable pianist is self-evident in everything he plays. But let’s hope he doesn’t pay too much heed to the hype his singular talent a

The perhaps wisely uncredited author of the piece about Tellef Johnson’s premiere of Sorabji’s Piano Sonata No. 5 (Full Score, February) seeks to claim ‘due seriousness’ for their report. The presumed

Had Robin Holloway published Music’s Odyssey—described by its author as “an invitation to the glorious long voyage of Western classical music”—30 years ago, he might well have got away with it. By day